The Media of Animalia

[!info] About This Page An Animalopedia article on the news organizations, broadcasting, and publishing culture of Animalia. Years follow TMA-Timeline. For the background to economic reporting, see TMA-Economy-AMT.

The media of Animalia form a peculiar ecosystem in which the broadsheets, the illicit radio, the municipal broadcast, and the tabloids quote one another and doubt one another in equal measure. The saying "in this city, one paper is never enough for the truth" is held to derive from the farewell address of the TMA Times's founding editor-in-chief 〔citation needed〕.

1. TMA Times (Founded AE 60)

The TMA Times is Animalia's flagship broadsheet and financial paper. It was founded in AE 60, during the period of stability that followed the Five-Family Accord (AE 51), under the banner "an age of accords needs a keeper of records" (→ TMA-Timeline). Its headquarters occupy the old letterpress-printworks building at the northern edge of Savanna Square.

1.1 Layout of the Paper

1.2 The Signature Column, "Mutterings of the House"

A weekly column by the anonymous columnist "Mister Odds", written in the conceit of assigning betting odds to every event in the city and commenting accordingly; it has run since the AE 80s. Theories as to his identity abound — a Goldfist Family lieutenant, a retired Tribunal clerk, a rotating cast of several writers 〔by whom?〕. There is a maxim: "any story on which Mister Odds has shortened the odds is already happening."

1.3 Keeping Its Distance from the Five Families

The TMA Times is known for "writing the names of the Five Families precisely, honorifics and all". It runs critical pieces, but never prying ones about their codes, rites, or cubs — this, it is said, is spelled out in the paper's editorial code 〔citation needed〕. The Families, for their part, observe an unwritten rule that direct pressure on the paper is "crass"; protest is conducted solely in the refined form of a simultaneous withdrawal of all advertising. When "The Invisible Faucet" ran in AE 89, the Oracle Tower press office delivered "notices of factual error" three times, and three times the paper answered by printing them in full.

2. Family Radio (AE 60–)

Family Radio is an illicit radio station devoted to underworld news. By curious coincidence it went on air in the same AE 60 as the TMA Times, and it is often remarked that "the recorder above ground and the storyteller below are the same age."

• Frequency: Changes nightly. The frequency for a given night is called "tonight's number", and it propagates encoded into the typos on street-stall menus, the arrangement of laundry on the line, the fight cards at the arena, and the like. In sixty years the Animalia City Police have never once located the transmitter (→ TMA-Police).
• Personalities: All are masked. The flagship is the late-night "Midnight Howler" — the newsreader who opens with a hoarse howl is said to be the third holder of the title, or the fifth 〔citation needed〕. The custom of placing a full ten seconds of silence before reading an obituary has not changed since the station first went on air.
• Content: The winners and losers of feuds, shifts in territory, "off-the-record commentary" on Tribunal rulings, the faces on the wanted lists, and the news the municipal broadcast will not read. All Five Families "could crush the station but do not" — reportedly because every Family uses it as a neutral channel of transmission 〔by whom?〕.
• Reliability: There is a proverb: "the TMA Times confirms the story before it prints; Family Radio prints only what's behind it." When it errs, it issues a correction the following night at the same hour, saying only: "last night's howl was the wind."

3. The Oracle Broadcast Tower (AE 92–)

The municipal broadcast, operational since AE 92. Under the supervision of the Oracle Tower press office, it transmits picture and sound across the whole of the city (→ TMA-Timeline).

• Principal programs: the scheduled newscast "Animalia Today", the civic bulletin "Word from the Tower", and the late-night ambient feed "Aurora Park Tonight".
• Tone: Unwavering in its editorial emphasis on the city's stability, cleanliness, and prosperity. Coverage touching on feuds, disappearances, or the Glitch Zone is exceedingly rare; when the first electromagnetic anomaly was observed in AE 108, it simply read out the city's announcement that it was "a fault at a substation".
• Criticism: Several factions on the Ecosystem Council have repeatedly flagged "editorial bias". Since the AE 113 order banning publication of the Void observations, the municipal broadcast has not touched the matter at all, prompting the TMA Times to remark drily that "the area of the city that goes unbroadcast grows wider every year" (see the AE 117 article).
• Viewing habits: Among citizens, "half-listening" is the norm, and it is the fact that the signal never breaks, rather than its content, that provides reassurance. A broadcast that never goes dark ranks alongside a streetlamp that never loses power as one of the emblems of the city's uncanny stability 〔citation needed〕.

The neutrality of this section is disputed. Objections that "the commentary on the municipal broadcast is excessive" and that "it understates the reality" have been raised at the same time (Talk: The Media of Animalia).

4. Tabloids and Occult Magazines

4.1 The Daily Fang (Founded AE 76)

An evening tabloid. Its signature layout indicates the degree of scandal by the number of fang-marks (one to five) set beside a headline. Its main battlegrounds are the private lives of Five-Family lieutenants, casino extravagance, and allegations of fixed bouts at the arena. A regular offender in the matter of false reports and defamation, it has nonetheless never had a single case brought before the Tribunal — "because the underworld counts fang-marks as an honor", it is said 〔citation needed〕.

4.2 Glitch Monthly (Founded AE 109)

An occult monthly founded the year after the Glitch Zone was first observed (AE 108). It specializes in the city's uncanny phenomena and unsolved cases, and serves as either the first venue or the definitive compendium for the major "standard subjects".

Its editor-in-chief, Nocturna Vesper (an owl; a pen name), is known for the editorial line: "we write no lies. We merely write the truths that cannot be confirmed." The municipal broadcast has never once mentioned the magazine, but its editors declare openly that this very silence is "the finest advertising".

5. Censorship and Freedom of the Press

There is no official system of censorship in Animalia. All the Oracle Tower press office does is issue "notices of factual error" and "recommendations of correction" — such is the city's official position.

The boundary between what can actually be written and what vanishes is described among press people roughly as follows 〔citation needed〕.

• Writable: the feuds of the Five Families, criticism of city government, economic mistrust (coverage of the Burrow Panic was never halted), the scandals of lieutenants.
• Vanishes: excavation records from the Roots Catacombs, follow-up reporting on the reason for Echo Station's closure (AE 71), the Void observation figures (from AE 113 on), and investigative reporting on those who access the city ledger.
• The "vanished article" urban legend: Testimonies surface periodically — an article that certainly ran cannot be found on the same page the next day; the reduced-facsimile edition and the clipping disagree. The TMA Times, of its own paper, replies that "there is no instance explicable by anything other than a swap-in error in the typesetting process". Yet veteran reporters, it is said, all agree that what the vanished articles had in common was that they "were written about what lies beneath the Tower" 〔by whom?〕. At the White Noise Café there really does exist a corkboard, called the "wall of vanished articles", where clippings of uncertain authenticity are pinned.

6. About the Animalopedia

This encyclopedia, the Animalopedia, is a collaboratively edited encyclopedia maintained by volunteer editors among the citizens of Animalia — or so this encyclopedia states of itself.

• Editors: All operate under anonymous handles. The oldest editor, "Burrower_01", is said to have made a first edit in AE 84, yet that editor's user page consists of a single line: "please attribute to me no fact other than my edit history."
• Editorial policy: a neutral point of view, verifiability, and the exclusion of original research. On many pages, however — including this very entry, "The Media of Animalia" — these policies coexist permanently with the 〔citation needed〕 tag.
• Common doubts: "it is unnatural that edit wars always converge on the same resolution", "there are far too many edits in the 3 a.m. hour", "the editor of any article whose deletion request succeeds never edits again afterward" — such observations recur, chiefly on the talk pages and in the reader-submission column of Glitch Monthly. An official page on the governance structure does exist, but its history is protected and cannot be viewed.
• This section has drawn deletion requests on the grounds that "for an encyclopedia to make an article of itself constitutes original research" — thirteen in all as of AE 121 — and on all thirteen occasions it has been kept as "notable".

This description is, in part, the subject of a deletion request (the fourteenth). For the discussion, see Talk: The Media of Animalia § The self-reference problem.